The Brothers Quay don’t stray far from their stop-motion roots with Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life, their first live-action feature (based upon Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gutten). Revisiting their animated shorts’ idiosyncratic visual and thematic preoccupations, the Quays’ film follows everyman Jakob (Mark Rylance) as he enrolls at the titular…

Though Mildred Pierce is renowned for marking Joan Crawford’s return to the apex of Hollywood stardom (after ditching long-time studio MGM), Michael Curtiz’s adaptation of hardboiled author James M. Cain’s novel is, first and foremost, a hearty genre pic fraught with tense social/sexual anxieties. Divorcing her unemployed husband, Mildred (Crawford) sets about supporting her two…

Michael Mann’s Miami Vice not only strips its iconic TV source material (on which Mann served as executive producer and creative head honcho) down to the barest of essentials, but it also functions as the purest, most evocative distillation yet of the director’s fascination with the thin line separating cops and crooks, identity confusion, the…

A petulant assertion of its creator’s messianic greatness, M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water may not be quite as awful as 2004’s The Village, but this mind-bogglingly convoluted batch of children’s fable gobbledygook certainly qualifies as stunning narcissistic self-exposure from a filmmaker blind to his own escalating failings as a storyteller. In place of…

So long as his films were reasonably sharp, Woody Allen’s clockwork efficiency in churning out a movie a year represented an admirable (and largely bygone) dedication to workmanship and the value of inventive minds remaining constantly inventive. As the director’s output has grown progressively lousier, however, such a tight schedule has seemed like a creative…

Philip K. Dick’s 1977 cautionary tale of deleterious drugs and insidious government/corporate power gets a rotoscoping makeover in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, which employs the filmmaker’s Waking Life visual schema – in which live-action actors and sets are covered by hallucinatory computer-drawn animation – as a means of amplifying its portrait of fluctuating, unstable…

As a bloody nightmare populated only by women and set in a deep, dark, narrow passageway-lined cave, The Descent certainly doesn’t lack for allegorical interpretations. Unfortunately, Neil Marshall’s tale of underground adventuring-gone-awry isn’t sturdy enough to support even superficial readings as a gory tract about feminism, lesbianism, or post-traumatic catharsis, with any analytic promise weakened…